Investigoogling Aspartame

[farnam]

 

 

Since my last post, I spent some time looking on line for information about Diet Coke addiction, or harmful effects from it. Might as well know what it is I’m dealing with.

As one would expect from the internet, there is lots of dross, and sadly, capitalism rears its head even here. On the first page of search results there were THREE efforts to sell products.  All along the lines of:

Addicted to diet Coke?

Here are lots of totally unsubstantiated claims as to why it’s bad for you.

And here are lots more totally unsubstantiated claims that it’s an almost impossible addiction to quit.

But take this simple drink instead, and you will be able to kick the diet coke habit in a DAY! Wow, imagine that!

 

No thanks, I’m not that silly. Sigh!

 

Anyway, it appears that any discussion on the addictive or harmful effects focus on either the caffeine or the aspartame content – always one or the other, never both. This leaves me curious, as I get such specific cravings for Diet Coke that are not in any way resolved by taking other foods with aspartame or caffeine, and I wonder if it could be another component entirely, or a synergistic effect at play, since my addiction is so specifically to Diet Coke. 

 

So, an investigoogilation into aspartame is rather depressing in and of itself. First you have all the scare-mongering websites, of the ‘Aspartame KILLS! Yikes, one drink of any diet soft drink and you will DIE!’ variety, all backed up by nothing other than self-referencing. And then there is all the other sort of information. The kind that goes ‘no, actually, aspartame is harmless; it’s been proven over and over again, totally harmless. Look, Mammy, no hands!’  The Wikipedia article was sadly totally unbalanced, and conformed totally to this stereotype. And again, backed up by nothing but self-referencing and one silly quote from the USA food and drug administration crowd. Sorry, not overwhelmed with trust here.

 

From there, I moved over to Google scholar, so as to ensure that I was reading proper, scientific peer reviewed info only, and that’s where it gets interesting. My conclusions based on this are:

 

Far from what the FDA say, aspartame isn’t over-researched. It’s under researched. Most references go back to the 80’s when it was first released. And most are very small scale studies. The most extensive one I was able to track down was done on 30 people over 28 days. The rest are all done on mice.

 

The rest of the research looks at three specific ‘beliefs’ as such about aspartame, trying to prove or debunk them. These are, namely:

 

1. Aspartame makes you fat, because even though it is calorie free in and of itself, it tricks the body into craving other carbohydrates.

 

2. Aspartame gives people migraines

 

3. Aspartame gives you brain cancer

 

I didn’t unearth one single article about the addictive/non-addictive properties it may have. Although this common belief is discussed extensively on the net, there wasn’t one scholarly article that made mention of it.

 

But, going back to the other three claims.

 

1. Aspartame does NOT make you gain (or loose) weight. It has no effect on your desire to eat other foods. Lots and lots of trials have been run, and none could discern any effect of aspartame over a placebo. There was one typical and hilarious study where they gave children either a sugar-sweetened or an aspartame sweetened soft drink before a main meal, and monitored the effects.  The results? Giving kids sweet drinks half an hour before dinner causes them to not eat their dinner. Wow, you don’t say! And they spent HOW much on this research?
2. Aspartame may give some people who are specifically susceptible a tenancy towards migraines, but the evidence is sketchy. As with so much medical research, you have the problem of really small sample sizes. 30 is a big study. Try ‘proving’ anything with a sample size of 30 in any other area and you’d be laughed out of the discipline. Anyway, some of these studies showed a slight increase in migraine immediately after, but the results for placebos were either almost as high, or sometimes even higher. In other words, believing that aspartame will give you a migraine will trigger a migraine after any soft drink if you think there might have been aspartame in it. On the surface some of these articles were funny. It fed my prejudices about western culture pathologising itself where everyone has to believe that they are such a very special snowflake, when it’s only the belief and not actually the ‘allergy’ that’s making them ill. On the other hand, there were also hints of scary… like for example ‘Of the 32 subjects randomized to receive aspartame (approximately 30 mg/kg/d) and placebo in a two-treatment, four-period crossover design, 18 completed the full protocol, seven completed part of the protocol before withdrawing due to adverse effects,…’ in other words, out of 32 people, a low does of aspartame made 7 of them ill enough to have to withdraw from the study, but because it wasn’t specifically migraines they were suffering from, there was no follow-up or explanation! So, aspartame isn’t causing migraines, but what IS it causing?
3. Aspartame causes cancer in rats. From the very first pre-launch trials, rats were removed from the study, had brain tumors removed, and were replaced in the trial, as the researchers didn’t believe that the brain tumors could be relevant, it wasn’t the kind of side effect they were looking for. Every other follow-up study on mice has led to the identical findings. Give mice aspartame and they get brain tumors. Further, more detailed studies of the effects over the life course started giving aspartame in very low does from the pre-natal period until the animal eventually died, and they found that they didn’t all die of brain tumors, because some died of lymphomas, leukemia and, among the female ones, breast cancer before the brain cancer got them. So, this is where it gets scary. Aspartame defiantly doesn’t make you gain weight whatever the idiot weight-loss régimes may say on the subject, and except for a very few people with a specific allergy, its unlikely to trigger a migraine, but it kills lab mice through a range of horrible cancers.

 

But, humans aren’t mice, right?

 

Of course I don’t let feed a dog anything containing pork, or chocolate, because different species react in different ways to different foods. Dogs get sick from those foods, humans don’t. Saying aspartame kills mice is all very well, what about humans?

I didn’t come across one single article looking at any research into whether this happens or not (bear in mind, I was using Google scholar, not some high powered university engine, so there may be many articles I didn’t come across). I DID come across one very interesting, and rather terrifying, article, though. Not the typical double-blind trial, but rather an epidemiology study by the American Association of Neuropathologists. It’s rather old, like so much of what I found, dating back to 1996. They found that there have been 2 marked spikes in rates of brain tumors. One slight one following the introduction of better diagnostic equipment, implying that there weren’t more people suffering brain tumors, just more people being accurately diagnosed. The second spike followed a couple of years after the introduction of aspartame into the western diet, and is very marked. They believe, based on the evidence they have looked at, that aspartame is the cause.

 

In conclusion, I am very defiantly going to cut not just diet coke, but all aspartame containing foods out of the family diet from now on. Its an unnecessary additive and while I didn’t find anything in my research on the scale of the evidence that smoking causes cancer, for example, what I did find were some strong indicators that this may be the case, along with a serious absence of research on behalf of those who want to debunk the idea. They do their studies alright, but they are all immediate, short term ones. And this is their only ‘proof’. But there is a very clear methodological flaw with this strategy. I’m a smoker, right? Give me my smokes for one day or one week and you won’t find them causing me any harm in that time. But it doesn’t mean that over the long term they are not a ticking time bomb causing all sorts of problems including, but not limited to, caner.

 

Similarly with aspartame. First hand reports of its addictive properties and health effects all start long after any research term would be up. And the only long-length studies that have been done all indicate serious harm.